Eric Armstrong won his race for the Iowa House last week. He’d dropped out of it in September.
The Associated Press reported that Armstrong, a former railroad executive, “had suspended his campaign two months ago because of health issues.” Iowa’s deadline for pulling a legislative nominee off the ballot had passed in August, so his name stayed on. It was the seat state Rep. Josh Turek (D) gave up to run for U.S. Senate, in a district Trump carried by about 8 points two years ago.
Armstrong announced he was “stepping down from my campaign, effective immediately,” in a September 7 post, so the winning campaign strategy was… not having one, and he beat Republican Keith Jones, “a Pottawattamie County supervisor and a retired police lieutenant,” by 865 votes! Crazy!
That’s how easy it was to win a race as a Democrat this year: you didn’t even have to be actively campaigning for a seat to win. (Go check the results! It’s entirely possible that you, too, have been elected to office this year without even knowing it!)
Tuesday’s victory was so big for Democrats that I really do believe that Democrats could have run on virtually any issue they wanted to, with virtually any position they wanted to, and still performed really, really well during these midterms. Most voters aren’t super tuned into what candidates’ positions are. Not everyone is a politics sicko like me, parsing the specific positions and statements from candidates. The truth is that external factors made this an easy win for Democrats.
The economy is not great. In October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation was at 3.7% and that gas prices (which affect the price of literally everything) were up 34.2% from a year earlier. Trump started a war with Iran in February and never asked Congress to approve it. When NBC News asked him about that in May, he said, “Nobody’s ever asked for it before. It’s never been used before. Why should we be different?” Sixty-three percent of voters told NBC’s exit pollsters the war was the wrong decision. Trump’s corruption is out of control and well documented (the $400 million jet from Qatar, for starters), and CBS’s exit poll found that “roughly nine in 10 voters nationally say government corruption is a major factor in their vote.”
Meanwhile, the president has been weirdly focused on things like the ballroom he tore down the East Wing to build, the 250-foot arch he wants near Arlington National Cemetery, and bizarre renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. At an event reopening the pool on what he called “the last day before the midterm elections, the most important midterm, I believe, in our lifetime,” he said: “Now, we’re giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool. We’ll announce that sometime tomorrow. I’m sure that Secretary Doug Burgum will have a lot of fun in announcing that now. I’m only kidding. I’m only kidding. Please don’t report it. They’ll cut it off and they’ll say, ‘He’s changing the name.’”
He’s just wildly, wildly out of touch. “Let them eat cake” personified. No wonder people voted against him and his party.
On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said, “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.” Trump agreed: “Well, I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term. And probably that’s probably it’s true. But at the same time, if I had to do again, I’d have to do it again, because long term it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
People were voting against Trump and against Republicans who’ve done nothing to act as a check on him. The AP’s Voter Poll found: “About 7 in 10 voters said Congress was not doing enough to provide checks and balances for the presidency, including about 4 in 10 Republicans.”
Last Tuesday, I wrote that Wednesday’s election takes were already written. People on all sides of this working in the activist and pundit spaces have been trying to attribute the wins to candidate positions on their pet issues. Everyone wants credit, but I think that’s borderline dishonest from all angles.
Was anyone’s take ever going to come out differently? No.
The people making declarations about what “won” and what “lost” have strong incentives to make their version stick. Some declarations will be more true than others, but it’s important to understand that the takes are essentially spin. Matthew Yglesias, who’s not exactly a fan of the left, was never ever ever ever going to offer analysis concluding that his personal worldview is hated by the public and that the party should veer away from it. Erin Reed of the trans-focused newsletter Erin in the Morning was never going to write that being anti-trans is the key to victory. Centrist think tank Third Way was never going to say that Medicare for All is what Democrats should be fighting for, regardless of the outcomes of the races.
In 2019, Third Way warned that Medicare for All “could re-elect Trump.” After Democrats won last year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, it put out a one-pager saying, “Running on this kind of mainstream playbook is what will make Democrats the majority makers in 2026 and 2028.” And on Wednesday, with dozens of House races still uncalled and its own seat counts labeled “as of Wednesday,” Third Way announced that “the lesson from this cycle is unequivocal: high-quality Democrats in the middle were the majority makers in 2026—and they are the model for 2028.” They wrote that sentence a year ago and just had to change the tense. They have a real incentive to convince the public that centrism is the way to go. I’m sure that after the 2028 election, if Democrats win, Third Way will once again conclude that it was because they moved to the “center” (rightward). If they lose in 2028, Third Way will conclude that they didn’t move enough to the “center.”
On the left, David Sirota posted this a little after 1 a.m. ET on Wednesday, while votes were still being counted:
The Working Families Party’s post-election recap said, “Our populist agenda became their closing argument.” Its memo from the day before the election had already said, “That anger is fueling energy for populist candidates supported by the WFP.”
LGBTQ advocacy organization The Human Rights Campaign said in 2024, when Democrats lost, that “anti-trans ads once again failed to motivate voters’ decisions at the ballot box,” and said this year, “Tonight voters delivered a resounding message: equality wins.”
The anti-trans right didn’t wait for the polls to close. At 4:46 p.m. ET on Election Day, the American Principles Project’s PAC posted a statement from the group’s president, Terry Schilling, that ended, “Regardless of the results tonight, Democrats have been forced to reconcile the fact that their madness is not winning the hearts and minds of the American people. And we will continue to hold the line until America’s families are safe and able to thrive!”
Regardless!
Trump reused his line from last year, which I quoted last week, about not being on the ballot. On election night, he posted, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” And he said he’d accept the results. Last week I also pointed to his long record of saying Democrats can only win by cheating. He hasn’t gone that far this time; as Forbes put it on Sunday, he “did not say the election was rigged or stolen.” (Quite a low bar to clear.) But on Thursday, with Alaska’s Senate race still uncalled, he posted, “The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over - He easily wins,” adding, “There is no other fair solution!” (The ballot included the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan Sullivan; Democrat Mary Peltola, who led narrowly as of Sunday; and an independent named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.) And lol, just kidding! On Monday, he posted a conspiracy theory that the election was rigged. So much for clearing the low bar, Don!
None of this is to say that anyone’s analysis here is wrong (other than Trump’s, because no, it was not rigged). Not Yglesias or Reed or Sirota or Third Way or the Working Families Party. But everyone’s doing a fair bit of cherry-picking to get to the conclusions they want to reach. For example…